Little Women

I watched Little Women with the girls tonight. Peace had never seen it and she didn't think she'd like it, but I told her to give it a try. She ended up saying that she loved the story and wants to read the book. I remembered that when I was her age Little Women was my favorite book and I used it for as many book reports as my teachers would let me. I think the first one I read was a children's version where Beth doesn't actually die. I loved the way it paralled with Pilgrim's progress, and the surprising twists the story takes. Mostly, I was drawn to the way the family stuck together through good and bad times. And the way each of the sisters was so different, but they loved each other so much.

It's fun to be able to pass on our love of certain stories to our children and remember my mom doing the same with us. I remember both of us crying and crying at the end of Charlotte's Web. All of us kids begging for just one more chapter of the suspenseful Trapped in the Old Cabin. Laughing over the Gordon Korman books. Not wanting the last in the Narnia series to come to an end. We didn't have a tv and lots of evenings were spent reading together. It was also a good way to pass the time on many long car trips.

We always have a chapter book going and usually I save it for last after our other school work and Bible reading are done. But this moring I brought it out first and we read 2 chapters of Eragon, eating breakfast and drinking tea, wrapped in blankets on the couch. Eragon is a fantasy that ended up on the best seller list, written by a homeschooled teenager. He has such an extensive vocabulary that I've had to get the dictionary out few times. Today we learned what exactly a zephyr is and what it meant when a horse quaffed. Because of it's themes, I'm glad to be reading it together with the kids-- it leads to all kinds of interesting discussions.

I hope my children will continue to enjoy being read to for a long, long time. I hope they continue to like some the books I grew up on and learn from the new ones. I hope Peace will like Little Women, but if not--that's ok, there's a lot more books out there!